This paper addresses the problem of streaming packetized media over
a lossy packet network, in a rate-distortion optimized way. Out of all the
packets that a
sender could transmit at a given transmission opportunity, we show how the sender
should
compute which packets, if any, to transmit in order to meet an average rate
constraint
while minimizing the average end-to-end distortion. Experimental results show
that our
system has steady-state gains of 3–7 dB or more over systems that are not
rate-distortion
optimized.